Bach as a Mensch and an Imperfect Human Being

‘Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven,’ by John Eliot Gardiner

Not to proclaim that an author’s first book will necessarily stand as his magnum opus, but it is hard to imagine what the English maestro John Eliot Gardiner, 70, might do to surpass “Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven” in its commitment, scope and comprehensiveness. True, as Mr. Gardiner writes and has amply shown over the decades, he is “equally (though differently) drawn to the three B’s — Beethoven, Berlioz and Brahms — and could have mustered equivalent fervor for writing about Monteverdi, Schütz or Rameau.”

Yet he has much more to do with his waking hours than research and write. Mr. Gardiner is best known as a busy conductor of his own ensembles and others, specializing in period practice and, in particular, the performance of Bach.

The founder of the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists (among other groups), he led them on an international Bach Cantata Pilgrimage through 50 cities (including New York) in 13 countries in 2000, the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death, performing each of the 198 surviving sacred cantatas at the appropriate time of year and recording most of them. The recordings are now available in a 56-CD set on Mr. Gardiner’s label, Soli Deo Gloria (named for the “S.D.G.” with which Bach initialed each cantata: “to the Glory of God alone”).

Mr. Gardiner is also something of a gentleman farmer, maintaining the family estate in Dorset, England, in trust as a working farm. His book draws heavily on his experience not only as a performer but also as a farmer (notably in a paean to “the common potato” as a battle-proof food supply, during a discussion of the Thirty Years’ War in Central Europe), an avocation he wears proudly.

What Mr. Gardiner offers is not mainly straight biography; for that Mr. Wolff’s book remains essential and Mr. Geck’s useful. Instead, Mr. Gardiner offers thematic chapters: “14 spokes of a wheel,” in his words, “all connected to a central hub — Bach as man and musician.”

His stated goals are to provide a “corrective to the old hagiolatry,” to get at the “Bach as mensch” who always eludes us, to find the man in his creation. He is in an excellent position to do this since Bach was as much performer as composer, and Mr. Gardiner, apart from his intensive lifelong study of the man and his works, has accumulated an experience in performing the music rivaled by few since old Bach himself.

In his warts-and-all depiction of the composer, he picks up where Mr. Geck left off. The chapter sure to attract the most attention is “The Incorrigible Cantor,” which details Bach’s difficulties with his employers throughout his career. Mr. Gardiner finds “signs of constitutional truculence and a recurrent refusal to accept authority,” possibly nurtured in a lawless atmosphere at the Latin school in Bach’s hometown, Eisenach, in what is now Germany, with perhaps more of same at the lyceum in Ohrdruf, where he transferred at 10, after his parents died.

“There is certainly sufficient circumstantial evidence here to dent the traditional image of Bach as an exemplary youth, on his way to becoming ‘the learned musician,’ surviving unscathed the sinister goings-on in the schools he attended,” Mr. Gardiner writes. “It is just as credible that the bewigged cantor-to-be was the third in a line of delinquent school prefects — a reformed teenage thug.”

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The author John Eliot Gardiner is best known as a conductor.Credit
Matthias Baus

Mr. Gardiner’s penultimate chapter, “The Habit of Perfection” (“a seamless process of self-correction and self-definition that never reached — perhaps never could reach — a state of finality”), deals with the Mass in B minor, considered by many to be Bach’s consummate masterpiece, comparing his work variously to Rembrandt’s and Bruegel’s. In the final chapter, “ ‘Old Bach,’ ” Mr. Gardiner writes, “Bach, the epitome of a musician who strove all life long and finally acquired the ‘Habit of Perfection,’ was a thoroughly imperfect human being.”

In his thoroughgoing discussions of Bach’s music, Mr. Gardiner can be forgiven for favoring the works he knows best in a practical sense, the texted sacred music: the cantatas, the Passions, the Mass in B minor, the motets. More than forgiven, in fact: thanked, since this crucial part of Bach’s output has seldom been analyzed so closely by anyone with the depth of study and the breadth of performance experience that Mr. Gardiner brings to it.

His book is dense with fact and full of diversions, with copious footnotes leading every which way. And most readers, unequipped with a working command of the music, especially the cantatas, will want if not need to make frequent recourse to recordings. (Happily, as noted above, Mr. Gardiner has supplied them.)

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But the book is also rich in informed conjecture. Of Bach’s gradual turn from what listeners today might consider “the parochiality of the liturgical context” to “music that shows more and more signs of an almost limitless appeal” (including music for the coffee house), Mr. Gardiner speculates, “It is entirely possible that Bach’s growing disenchantment with cantatas in the 1730s arose from a sense that the communality of belief that he had once shared with his congregation was breaking down, and that, for whatever reason, he was now failing to make his mark.”

Mr. Gardiner writes in a lively, conversational fashion, if not always a syntactically correct or felicitous one. Dangling participles and other detached modifiers abound. But such things are the stock in trade of an editor, and as one who worked long in that trade, I tend to blame Knopf’s editors at least as much as Mr. Gardiner for those lapses.

In any case, trivial imperfections in the face of overwhelming achievements only support Mr. Gardiner’s view of Bach and his place in history. Mr. Gardiner has done a masterly, monumental job of taking the measure of Bach the man and the musician.

BACH

Music in the Castle of Heaven

By John Eliot Gardiner

Illustrated. 628 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $35.

Dwight Garner is on book leave.

A version of this review appears in print on December 4, 2013, on Page C7 of the New York edition with the headline: Bach as a Mensch and an Imperfect Human Being. Today's Paper|Subscribe